


Sigh No more

by MilkMoustachesAreCool



Series: Music Is My Life [1]
Category: Nothing Much to Do
Genre: Inner Dialogue, M/M, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 12:51:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4479851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkMoustachesAreCool/pseuds/MilkMoustachesAreCool
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Balthazar sings a cover of Sigh No More by Mumford and Sons and considers the importance of the lyrics in his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sigh No more

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Obviously I don't own Sigh No More, I'm just quoting it.
> 
> So basically I want to explore the music in the show a bit more, make some suggestions as to what was being thought when certain things were sang/written, this being the first in a series (I hope, if I don't lose motivation) focusing on the music in NMTD and LLL. This one I did mostly because I wanted to know the reason behind Balthazar's favourite quote, the others should all be Balthazar's (or other people's) thought process when writing songs.

Balthazar lightly strummed his guitar as Pedro prepared his phone. If he was being honest, he was nervous. Sigh No More was by far his favourite song, but he was worried about what that said about him. What if everyone realised why he loved the song so much? What if they heard the lyrics, applied them to Balthazar and put two and two together? Was he ready for people to know how much he related to this song? Definitely not. Then again, he reasoned with himself, he had told the whole internet his favourite quote from this song and no one had noticed anything (or at least not that they let on). It would be fine. It was just a song. No one would read that much into it anyway.

Nonetheless, his stomach lurched when Pedro suddenly spoke up. “Okay, I’m ready when you are,” he smiled, waggling his eyebrows. Balthazar swallowed and returned his smile, desperately trying to cover a blush.

“Alright, um,” he said, turning to the microphone set up in front of him. He took a deep breath before playing the first few notes.

“Serve God, love me and mend,” he sang.  
“This is not the end.”

This is not the end. These were words that he repeated to himself whenever he was going through a difficult time. This is not the end. The story doesn’t end here, it keeps going. More things will happen, I’ll get through this, and eventually this will be a half-forgotten problem of the past. It won’t always matter. This is not the end.

“Live unbruised, we are friends.”

Friends. He and Pedro were friends. Just friends. But wasn’t that better than nothing? At least he had Pedro in some form, even if it wasn’t the form he would have preferred. And so long as they stayed friends, Balthazar couldn’t really be hurt (or bruised). The alternative was Balthazar telling Pedro how he felt and probably being rejected. Then he wouldn’t even have Pedro as a friend. That would certainly do more than bruise him. No, it was better to do as the song said. Live unbruised as friends.

“And I’m sorry,  
I’m sorry.”

He was sorry. Sorry to Pedro for not being able to get over him. Sorry for not being honest with him. Sorry for not being the friend that Pedro deserved. And he was sorry to himself for inflicting so much torture on himself. For not being able to help it. For loving someone he shouldn’t.

“Sigh no more, no more,  
One foot in sea, one on shore.”

He almost wanted to laugh at that one – it was just so accurate. The amount of long, drawn-out sighs he had released while thinking about Pedro. If only he could stop. Stop thinking about Pedro. Stop living in between – thinking about him, but never doing anything about it. If he could only choose one or the other – love Pedro properly, telling him everything, or forget him and get over him. But no, apparently Balthazar was determined to live with one foot in the sea and one on the shore, his thoughts in love with his Pedro, his actions not. Leaving him with a life full of those sighs to look forward to (okay, maybe not his whole life, but still).

“My heart was never pure,  
You know me,  
You know me.”

Everyone called Balthazar the nice one. The kind one. The perfect one. If only they knew. If only they knew the intense hatred he sometimes felt for Beatrice, in his weaker moments, for being the one that Pedro wanted. If only they knew how impatient he got in his mind when Pedro or Claudio or Benedick was rambling on about some girl or other, be it Beatrice, Hero or Scarlett Johansson. If only they knew how angry he got sometimes that Pedro couldn’t see what was right in front of him. If only they knew how terrified, even cowardly, he was when he thought of telling Pedro the truth. Balthazar’s heart was certainly never pure.

On the other hand, Pedro did know some of that. He knew Balthazar better than most people, and he never called Balthazar perfect. He always knew when Balthazar needed to rant about something (usually due to a sudden influx of angsty songs). He was one of the few people on earth that Balthazar let his walls down in front of. He knew Balthazar.

“But man is a giddy thing,  
Oh man is a giddy thing,  
Oh man is a giddy thing,  
Oh man is a giddy thing.”

If there was one thing that Balthazar knew for certain, it was that men were ‘giddy’. Unreliable. Here one moment, gone the next. He knew it from his own mind – the one that one moment would be thinking about how unbelievably perfect Pedro was and the next cursing him for being a blind idiot. He knew it from Pedro, who one moment would be spending every spare moment with Balthazar, laughing, telling secrets, making inside jokes, and the next would be distant and vague, talking only about Beatrice when he did talk.

“Love; it will not betray you  
Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free.”

Balthazar thought back to when he had offered that to Ursula and her camera as his favourite quote. He knew that Ursula hadn’t understood why he had chosen that quote. After all, she was the one who had witnessed just how much Balthazar had been enslaved by Pedro. That was the thing though – it was Pedro who was enslaving Balthazar. It was his own mind that was enslaving him. It wasn’t love itself. Love is pure and beautiful, even if it’s difficult sometimes. Love wasn’t the hollow feeling in Balthazar’s stomach when Pedro stared at Beatrice, it was the euphoric feeling when Balthazar stared at Pedro. Love was the feeling Balthazar got when he watched Pedro play football, how perfect he looked, focused and determined. Love was the feeling when Pedro whispered conspiratorially in class, as if Balthazar was the only other person in the world. Love was the feeling when Pedro called Balthazar in the middle of the night when something was wrong, because he trusted Balthazar more than anyone else and wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable in front of him. And that feeling would never dismay or enslave Balthazar. That feeling was the reason life was worth living, to Balthazar. Even if it meant dealing with the harder feelings too sometimes.

“Be more like the man that you were made to be.”

Who was Balthazar made to be? He wasn’t sure. This line always made him question himself – a good thing, in Balthazar’s eyes. He never wanted to become complacent in his life. His latest answer to the question was a musician. He wanted to be a musician. He even thought that maybe that was what he had been made to be. Music was the only thing he was really passionate about in this world. He thought of it more as a calling than an interest or a hobby. From when he was a child he had always just wanted to surround himself with music, to learn how to recreate everything he heard, to hear the beauty in everything, to turn the world into music. That was why he was here today after all – if he wanted to be a musician, he had to start somewhere. He had agreed to let Pedro record him in the hopes of actually doing something productive with his music, rather than just singing to himself in his bedroom. If he worked up the courage, he could even imagine recording some of his own songs someday. That was the man that Balthazar thought (or hoped) he might have been made to be.

“There is a design, an alignment to cry,  
Of my heart to see,  
The beauty of love as it was made to be.”

It had taken him a while. A while to be able to see the beauty of love. To recognise how amazing it was, regardless of some of the shit stuff that came with it. In fact, it was this song that had probably made him finally understand love. This song that had taught him how to appreciate love for what it is. For what it was made to be. This song that showed him the beauty of love. This song that had opened his heart so that loving Pedro had hurt less and less. This song was the design, the alignment to cry, for Balthazar. This song had changed the way Balthazar viewed love, Pedro, himself, life. It had changed his life. Ultimately, that was why it was his favourite song.

He sang the last few repeats and strummed the last chords and finally fell silent. He looked up to see Pedro beaming as he put his phone back in his pocket. Clearly Pedro hadn’t read too much into Balthazar’s favourite song then. Balthazar didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. He decided to settle for a mixture of the two.


End file.
